Twain’s purpose had been less to mock Malory than to ridicule the shortcomings of English monarchy and aristocracy, both medieval and modern. Nor were those his only satiric targets, which also included the Roman Catholic Church and the American robber barons of his own Victorian age. But the attack on aristocratic privilege, cruelty, and incompetence was the most blatant, made doubly so by Daniel Carter Beard’s pro-labor illustrations for the text. In some of his drawings, Beard (with Twain’s approval) used quite recognizable faces as models—Tennyson as Merlin, Jay Gould as a slave driver, Queen Victoria as a hog, and the prince of Wales (later Edward VII) as a “chucklehead.” With jokes like that, it’s a minor miracle Twain had any English friends left at all
Behind all three of his themes lay his gathering anger about both the flagging sales of Webster & Company and the repeated disappointments in the development of the Paige Compositor. The voice we hear in the talk of the Yankee narrator as he complains about the backwardness of Camelot is the same one we hear in the impatiently worded letters Twain wrote to Webster and in his complaints about Paige’s latest dismantling of his invention. In both Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee, the narrator exposes human and social inequities. The anger in the first book, however, is conveyed ironically through a naive but clever teenager, while its expression in the second is from none other than Mark Twain himself, speaking also in the first person. The unsentimental, irreverent, and straight-talking Yankee undercuts whatever deep ironic purpose Twain had in mind when he decided to write his own version of Camelot. For, as James M. Cox observes, “instead of converting the indignation which stands behind satire into ironic observation, apparent indifference, and mock innocence which constitute it, Twain paraded his indignation in front of the world to be criticized.”2 Missing now was the stealthlike irreverence found in the works between The Innocents Abroad and Huckleberry Finn.
Briefly, the story of A Connecticut Yankee concerns Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century mechanic and foreman for the Colt Fire Arms Manufactory in Hartford (where the Paige typesetter was being infinitely perfected). In a fight with one of his workers, Hank is knocked unconscious. He wakes up in sixth-century England and is almost executed as a captive of an adventuring knight, but saves himself through knowledge of a solar eclipse about to take place, using it to convince King Arthur and his court that he has magical powers superior to Merlin’s. During the next ten years he seeks to improve the country by covertly introducing nineteenth-century technology, at first hoping simply to make a profit but later intent on reforming the morals of Camelot and undercutting its class system by introducing democracy. In the end, he is both frustrated by the failure of reform to have any lasting effect on human beings and, more directly, thwarted by the Catholic Church, which controls the ideology that keeps the system in place. The tale concludes by having Hank electrocute thousands of knights, leaving him trapped in Merlin’s cave behind a mountain of corpses. Merlin, who has been upstaged by Hank’s more scientific magic, gets his revenge, before being accidentally electrocuted himself, when he condemns Hank to a death worse than that of the knights: a living one in which he will sleep for the next thirteen centuries until he wakes up again in the present, yearning for his life in the sixth century, during which he had married and fathered a child. The tale’s irreverent treatment of Malory’s classic in the effort to satirize English nobility added to the British resentment Twain had originally stimulated with his earlier “book about the English,” The Prince and the Pauper.
Interestingly, Twain was personally delighted with Morte Darthur. He had been familiar with its great legends as early as 1880, when he purchased a children’s edition for the family library. He was reintroduced to the work in 1884 when Cable bought him a copy of the standard Globe edition in Rochester during a stop there on their lecture tour. Reveling in its tales of chivalry and adventure, he and Cable spoke its archaic dialect in jest to each other. During their stop in Indianapolis in the winter of 1885, he wrote his daughter Susy: “When I get home, you must take my Morte Arthur & read it. It is the quaintest and sweetest of all books.” He quoted from memory a passage on the death of Launcelot, comparing its eloquence to that of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. When a year later Mary Fairbanks evidently expressed shock that he would satirize this classic, he protested that his story was simply a contrast with life today. “Of course,” he continued, “I shall leave unsmirched & unbelittled the great & beautiful characters drawn by the master hand of old Malory.” At the time of this letter, he had written only three chapters of his book; they made good fun of Malory’s romance without attacking the ideal of chivalry itself. But when he took up the book again in the summer of 1887, his stance toward his subject took a dramatic turn.3 “It is enough to make a body ashamed of his race,” Hank exclaims in chapter 8, on the sham of aristocracy, “to think of the sort of froth that has always occupied its thrones without shadow of right or reason, and the seventh-rate people that have always figured as its aristocracies.” The writing of A Connecticut Yankee became on-the-job training for the later anti-imperialist and debunker of Christian myth.
As noted in chapter 35, Matthew Arnold’s criticism of American culture had irritated Clemens and had whipped up his anti-British sentiment in a flourish matched only by his denigration of the French in his journals a decade earlier. “Yours is the civilization of slave-making ants,” he wrote in the summer of 1888, much in the way that Hank Morgan belittles aristocratic claims. “A monarchy is perpetuated piracy. In its escutcheon should always be quartered the skull & cross-bones.” He got a good deal of his Anglophobic propaganda from George Standring’s People’s History of the English Aristocracy (1887), a book he even thought of reissuing through Webster & Company as a companion volume to A Connecticut Yankee. Standring’s thesis was that England’s only hope lay in its shifting away from a monarchy to a republic, and that efforts in that direction had been undercut in 1886, a year before the celebration of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. At home Twain had also become interested in the U.S. labor movement.4
The diatribe that ultimately controlled the tone of A Connecticut Yankee was not simply vituperative; it was also frequently filled with pathos. In his moving descriptions of profound human suffering endured by the common man at the hands of the nobility, Twain stripped away Camelot’s romantic veneer. In chapter 18, “In the Queen’s Dungeons,” Twain paints a vivid picture of the suffering that Morgan le Fay, King Arthur’s wicked sister, causes without the slightest hesitation or pang of conscience. Calling her a Vesuvius, he writes: “As a favor, she might consent to warm a flock of sparrows for you, but then she might take that very opportunity to turn herself loose and bury a city.” Of a husband and wife separated and jailed indefinitely because the bride had refused le droit du Seigneur, the custom that entitled her lord and master to first connubial rights, he describes the couple “as kerneled like toads in the same rock; they had passed nine pitch dark years within fifty feet of each other, yet neither knew whether the other one was alive or not. All the first years, their only question had been . . . ‘Is he alive?’ ‘Is she alive?’ But they had never got an answer; and at last that question was not asked any more—or any other.”
This “humorist” could depict human suffering powerfully, but he could also be cleverly funny. When he wasn’t lashing out at the nobility directly, Twain satirized it with the same wit that ran through his early work and that by now had made him famous. In an episode typical of Morte Darthur, Hank Morgan, by now known in Camelot as “Sir Boss,” sets off in chapter 11 with the demoiselle Alisande la Carteloise, or “Sandy,” to liberate forty-five “young and beautiful” princesses who have languished in “cruel captivity for twenty-six years.” (As Hank notes in chapter 19, time has no impact on either the youth or the prowess of the inhabitants of Arthur’s kingdom. In Malory’s tale, for example, Launcelot and his illegitimate son, Galahad, are physical equals. Morgan le Fay in A Connecticut Yankee is described as “fresh and young as a
Vassar pullet.”) The quest, pursued over several chapters, is almost forgotten by Hank, but when they do arrive at the “ogre’s castle” in chapter 20, it turns out to be “nothing but a pig-sty.” It is not a pig-sty, however, in the ideologically trained eye of Sandy, who sees what one would expect to find in Camelot—captive princesses, not pigs. “When I saw her fling herself upon those hogs, with tears of joy running down her cheeks, and strain them to her heart, and kiss them,” Hank concludes, “I was ashamed of her, ashamed of the human race.”
Twain’s assault is on the ideology that is the foundation of class differences. Behind the sham of nobility, he found the Catholic Church. Much of his invective toward the Church found its ballast in William Lecky’s History of European Morals (1874), a book that Twain had first read, heavily marking his personal copy, in the mid-1870s, not long after his first visit to England. “Though Clemens’ concept of the Church as villain was probably not inspired by Lecky alone,” writes Howard Baetzhold, “in A Connecticut Yankee he drew most of the ammunition for his assaults from the historian’s well-stocked arsenal.”5 Indeed, one of the factors, if not literary weaknesses, of this novel is that it was, unlike Huckleberry Finn, almost exclusively driven by political theory. Standring and Lecky, it appears, were involuntary ghostwriters of a Mark Twain classic.
In History of European Morals, Lecky argued demonstrably that between the fall of Rome and the Renaissance the Catholic Church had consecrated the idea of secular rank among the nobility as a way to retain its own influence through such superstitions as the divine right of kings. In effect, the freemen that Hank comes to want to release from their social bonds were brainwashed into believing in the sanctity of their own slavery or menial social condition, the way the Protestant church in the United States, as reflected in Huckleberry Finn, had convinced the narrator who woke up in the antebellum days of Sam Clemens’s youth that slavery was moral and upheld by the Bible.
Twain had been arguing with Lecky ever since the writing of Huck’s tale. While he used his anti-Catholic material in A Connecticut Yankee in both books, he disagreed with Lecky the intuitionist, who held that man was endowed with a moral sense that could overcome circumstance. Commenting in chapter 18 on Morgan le Fay’s casual cruelty as a sovereign right, Hank declares that “training is everything. . . . We have no thoughts of our own, no opinions of our own.” Granting that our being might hold a thimbleful of individuality, he insists that everything else is “contributed by, and inherited from, a procession of ancestors that stretches back a billion years to the Adam-clam or grasshopper or monkey from whom our race has been so tediously and ostentatiously and unprofitably developed.” Twain allowed, however, for “that one microscopic atom in me that is truly me.” It would have been nice to think it was that part of Huck that decided to “go to hell” in order to save Jim, but by the time Mark Twain sat down to write his next book about slavery (Pudd’nhead Wilson), he had probably decided that Huck’s story was merely a romance, indeed, as much of a dream as Hank’s sojourn in Camelot.
Much of the plot of A Connecticut Yankee after the liberation of the hog/princesses reads rather tediously today, but it would have been interesting to most readers in 1889, partly because of Hank’s arguments about protection and free trade. In “Sixth Century Political Economy” (chapter 33), in which artisans do not understand inflation and are thus deceived by “high wages,” Twain mirrors the conflict between capital and labor in the American 1880s. It was during this decade that the membership of the Knights of Labor approached seven hundred thousand. Ever since the Civil War the American economy had grown voraciously, but workers’ wages—with the decline of the artisan worker after the war—had not kept up with the success of the various business trusts and monopolies. Begun almost twenty years earlier as a secret organization in order to protect itself from retaliation from the companies it opposed, the Knights of Labor had recently won a number of strikes for the eight-hour working day, culminating in its victory in the Union Pacific strike of 1884. Its support of workers included women and blacks, though not Asians. Women, previously limited to the arduous occupation of sewing, flooded the new labor pools created by such inventions as the typewriter and the telephone switchboard. Switchboard operators were known as “hello girls.” In A Connecticut Yankee, Hank’s child with Sandy—supposedly one of the new generation in Camelot not to be held back by the old superstitions of social rank—is called “Hello Central.”
The influence of the Knights began to wane around 1886, as Twain began his novel. The union fell into disagreements with competing labor groups. In one of his political cartoons in Harper’s Weekly during 1886, which must have attracted Twain’s attention, Thomas Nast—whose houseguest Twain had been in 1884—depicts the Knights’ opposition to the skilled craft unions in a scene in which two knights joust as capital looks on approvingly, much in the way King Arthur and Queen Gwynevere in Morte Darthur look upon tournaments in which knights kill or maim each other for fame and honor. The Knights of Labor also lost its allure with the public and the press by becoming involved in a number of May Day strikes that failed. The Haymarket Riot of May 4, 1886, in Chicago essentially finished off the organization when it was unfairly blamed for the bloodshed. Chicago at the time counted eighty thousand Knights but an even greater number of immigrants committed to socialist doctrines. Eight of these alleged anarchists were rounded up and quickly sentenced to death in a legal lynching that infuriated Howells but seems not to have upset Twain.6
Yet this former printer was cautiously committed to labor movements that were relatively free of the taint of socialists and communists. On March 22, 1886, he read his article entitled “The New Dynasty” to the Monday Evening Club. His interest in labor may have been sparked in part by his involvement in the campaign for an international copyright agreement. In January he had testified before the Senate Committee on Patents about the issue. One of those also arguing before the committee, a printer and member of the Knights of Labor, claimed (falsely) that his union counted between four and five million members in order to buttress his demand that all foreign books sold in the United States be printed there. Condemning power as normally leading to oppression, Twain found an exception in the Knights because they supposedly banded together for the welfare of all workers, not just bricklayers or stenographers. By virtue of the strength of his union’s membership, this mere artisan had more clout, he told the Monday Evening Club audience, than James Russell Lowell had when he appeared before the same Senate committee in support of the international copyright law, because the labor leader spoke, as Twain rather awkwardly stated it (perhaps revealing his own lingering skepticism about the masses), as “the nation in person speaking; and its servants, real— not masters called servants by canting trick of speech—listening.”7
Twain must have found himself in the same paradox that Hank Morgan does—indeed, A Connecticut Yankee can be seen as a reflection of Twain’s social and economic dilemma in the 1880s. Here was a rich entrepreneur, the owner of a publishing company and an investor (at the rate of $5,000 a month) in the development of the Paige Compositor, arguing for union labor before the elite members of the Monday Evening Club in Hartford, the citadel of insurance brokers and investment bankers, the very kind of unproductive laborers to whom the Knights of Labor refused membership, along with gamblers and liquor producers. Hank, the dispossessed heir of Huck, is forced to kill off part of the society he has generally been trying to improve. Ultimately, Twain produced a dystopia in an era of utopian novels encouraged by the advances of technology (for example, the immensely popular Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, published a year before Twain’s novel). Bellamy’s protagonist is turned out of the very kind of Eden that had housed the white romance of Huckleberry Finn. Hank’s reality is that the human race is condemned to acting out endlessly the same mistakes that Huck naively thought could be avoided. As a result, there is no happy ending in A Connecticut Yankee, no lighting out for (or return to) Camelot and Malor
y’s fantastic sense of time.
38 Progress and Poverty
Mark Twain continued to hammer away at British nobility in his next novel, published in 1892. He had begun The American Claimant in the mid-1880s as an unsuccessful drama cowritten with Howells; it had been adapted from the play version of The Gilded Age and was ultimately entitled “Colonel Sellers as a Scientist.” Matthew Arnold’s attack on the irreverence of American newspapers is ridiculed in the story by contrasting them with the British press, which is seen as nothing more than a propaganda tool for the glories “of the petted and privileged few, at cost of the blood and sweat and poverty of the unconsidered masses.”1 (Ironically, in this era of the robber baron, American newspapers were doing the same favors for big business.) Twain did not actually compose The American Claimant until the spring of 1891, but the British grievances festered in his mind long after the completion of A Connecticut Yankee, especially when English reviewers assailed that book upon its appearance in 1889. He would eventually reconcile himself with the British, when his concerns about unearned privilege broadened into disenchantment with the excesses of political power on both sides of the Atlantic.
“When I finished Carlyle’s French Revolution in 1871,” he told Howells in August 1887, “I was a Girondin; every time I have read it since, I have read it differently—being influenced & changed, little by little, by life & environment, . . . & now I lay the book down once more, & recognize that I am a Sansculotte!—And not a pale, characterless Sansculotte, but a Marat.” It was in that same summer that his theme in A Connecticut Yankee turned anti-imperialist. When in chapter 13 Hank comes upon freemen laboring without pay on their bishop’s road, their subjugation reminds him of “reading about France and the French, before the ever-memorable and blessed Revolution, which swept a thousand years of such villainy away in one swift tidal wave of blood.” Hank subsequently concludes that there were two “ ‘Reigns of Terror’ . . . the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years.” He added in his letter to Howells that his changed reading of Carlyle had come from within because “Carlyle teaches no such gospel.”2 Twain had traveled a long way from his days in Hawaii in the 1860s, when he first came upon a feudal system, though one already on the wane. Although he instinctively disapproved of Hawaiian royalty, he was at the time more interested in American missionaries who, while they clothed and civilized the indigenous population, also taught them about another “royal” paradise called heaven and how difficult it was to get there.
Mark Twain - The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens Page 35